Laura Meckler:
Well, a lot of this stuff is sort of low-key stuff that we don’t really think about.
So, for instance, one of the things that this Institute for Education Sciences does is, they do sort of a census of all schools. They gather information about, how many schools are there, how many kids are enrolled, what’s the demographics of those students, what’s the demographics of the teaching force?
This is information that we use for other federal programs. It’s information that other researchers rely on, that journalists rely on, that really forms the backbone of our understanding. So that’s an example of one of the contracts that was suddenly canceled out of the blue on Monday.
You also have work to evaluate programs, just try to understand better sort of what works and what doesn’t, whether it be an early childhood program or a literacy program. So it ranges from sort of big things like that to sort of niche programs.
Also, the U.S. participation in international assessments that, whenever you hear data like, well, the U.S. ranks X or Y against other countries in reading or math, that comes from studies and from testing that’s done. And there’s a contract to do that testing. That was cut.
